Project summary
Findings
Twitter data
Twitter data was obtained freely through a partnership between UCSB Library and Crimson Hexagon. Before downloading, the data was queried to meet the following conditions:
Crimson Hexagon only allows 10,000 randomly selected tweets to be exported, manually, at a time in .xls format. Due to this restriction, data was manually downloaded for every 2 days in order to capture all tweets. There were around 5000 average number of daily tweets that met these conditions.
The Crimson Hexagon data did not contain all desired information, including whether or not the tweet was geotagged. To get this information we used the python twarc library to “rehydrate” the data using individual tweet ids and store the tweet information as .json files. From here we were able to remove all tweets that did not have a geotag, giving us a total of 79,981 tweets.
Here is a sample of the type of the final twitter information we obtained.
| created_at | full_text | user_location | retweet_count | favorite_count |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sat Nov 21 20:43:16 +0000 2015 | Loaded up and ready for #brewsuphoedown at the carriage museum now until 4pm! Beer, whiskey & BBQ!… https://t.co/dBvl2rYlXg | Santa Barbara, Ca | 0 | 0 |
| Wed Jul 26 04:08:17 +0000 2017 |
a man who drinks milkshakes for breakfast is a man you can trust. or, rather, a mangmaan. @… https://t.co/0kEEAaahkP |
san diego, ca. | 0 | 0 |
| Thu Jan 01 01:48:04 +0000 2015 | Happy new year 2015. Steal the glasses. Pilsner… (Sin-Tax Imperial Stout (Peanut Butter)) http://t.co/RHA1gj91QL #photo | oakland hotw | 0 | 0 |
| Mon Nov 09 22:55:31 +0000 2015 | RJ at Velvet Jones the other night was dope! #rj #ommio #velvetjones #watchwhatyousay #hiphop #live… https://t.co/lx0eHANX1K | SoCal in the Goodland | 0 | 0 |
| Sun Oct 16 19:42:40 +0000 2016 | current weather in Santa Barbara: light rain, 64°F 97% humidity, wind 4mph, pressure 1023mb | Santa Barbara, CA | 0 | 0 |
| Sun Dec 06 00:26:07 +0000 2015 | Back to the scene of the crime, 3 years later, BEST decision I’ve ever made ❤️💍👰🏽 So happy for… https://t.co/lvDCR4MJwB | West Hollywood | 0 | 0 |
| Mon Mar 30 05:26:10 +0000 2015 | Reminder that if you pay me I’ll draw things for you | Seaux Cal | 0 | 0 |
The spatial distribution of tweets highlights areas of higher population density and tourist areas in downtown Santa Barbara. There is a single coordinate that has over 11,000 tweets reported across all years. It is near De La Vina between Islay and Valerio. There is nothing remarkable about this site so I assume it is the default coordinate when people tag “Santa Barbara” generally. The coordinate is 34.4258, -119.714.
As you zoom in on the map, clusters will disaggregate. You can click on blue points to see the tweet.